1. Field of the Invention
The invention herein relates to oral hygiene devices. More particularly it relates to tongue scrapers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Dentists and other oral health care providers have known for some time that deposits of plaque on a person's tongue can be a major contributor to oral malodor or "bad breath". Practitioners have therefore strongly recommended to their patients that the patients use tongue scrapers to clean the surface of the tongue each day and remove the plaque before it can accumulate in large quantities and generate the offensive odors. The prior art is replete with patents and literature articles on tongue scrapers and their use, and many such tongue scrapers have been marketed commercially. A example of a typical tongue scraper is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,217,475 and in the references there described.
Conventional tongue scrapers when properly used are quite adequate for daily hygienic scraping of the tongue surface and removal of plaque to prevent formation of offensive mouth odors. However, the conventional tongue scrapers, such as those described in the above-cited patent, are of little use for serious research on plaque accumulation and oral odor generation. Conventional tongue scrapers provide no means for a researcher to collect useful samples of plaque or to measure plaque accumulation. Techniques such as flushing of the oral cavity are not useful, since such flushing is not specific to the tongue, but rather collects plaque from throughout the oral cavity.